Locus Focus

Locus Focus host Barbara Bernstein talks with local, regional and national experts, activists and policy makers about climate change, food policy, land use, salmon restoration, forest management and all the other things that matter in our environment.

A year ago Texas Activists with Tar Sands Blockade locked themselves to equipment being used to build the Keystone XL pipeline, near Nacogdoches, Texas. A year later the battle over the pipeline is still raging but we hear less about the dramatic actions that made headlines last year. On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with Nation contributing writer and climate activist Wen Stephenson about how the struggle against the Tar Sands continues, as activists in Texas connect the fight against the Keystone pipeline with the struggle for environmental justice.

Coal and oil trains, pipelines and terminals proproposed for the Pacifid NW - with Eric de Place

Originally broadcast on September 9, 2013
COAL TRAINS, OIL TRAINS, PIPELINES coming through the Pacific Northwest

This summer the port of Vancouver, Washington approved plans to build a terminal for oil trains, over widespread opposition from the community. Meanwhile anti-coal activists are still trying to fend off three proposed coal terminals in Oregon and Washington and Kinder Morgan is going ahead promoting its plan to enlarge and extend its Trans Mountain Pipeline that carries tar sands crude from Alberta to Burnaby, BC.

We now live in a new geologic era shaped more by human forces than those of nature. But the environmental crisis we face today, has been underway for hundreds of years. Ours is now a '10 percent world'—a planet with just one-tenth of its former abundance.

On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with journalist J.B. MacKinnon, author of THE ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD. We'll discuss how in order to reverse our damaging course, we need to remember nature as it was, reconnect to it as something meaningful in our lives, and begin to remake a wilder world.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has vowed that his institution will fight poverty and climate change, a claim that World Bank presidents have made for two decades. But if worldwide protests and reams of damning internal reports are any indication, too often it does just the opposite. By funding development projects and programs that warm the planet and destroy critical natural resources on which the poor depend, the Bank has been hurting the very people it claims to serve. On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with Bruce Rich, author of Foreclosing the Future: The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction, which depicts how the World Bank is a microcosm of global political and economic trends—powerful forces that threaten both environmental and social ruin.

From Indian vultures to Chinese bees, nature provides the "natural services" that keep the economy going - as well as ecological balance. From the recycling miracles i the soil to an army of predators ridding us of unwanted pests, it has been estimated that these and other services each year are worth about double the global GDP. Yet we take most of Nature's services for granted, imagining them free and limitless - until they suddenly switch off.

On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with British environmentalist Tony Juniper, whose book What Has Nature Ever Done for Us? How Money Really Does Grow on Trees points out that if we realized the true economic as well as intrinsic value of nature, we would stop treating our natural systems in a destructive manner.

An effort is underfoot to wrest control of Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services and Water Bureau from the Portland City Council and transfer them to an obscure board lacking transparency and accountability. This effort masquerades as a populist movement but is in fact a Trojan horse backed by industrial water users designed to lower their costs and defund the City's most important environmental programs.

This summer the port of Vancouver, Washington approved plans to build a terminal for oil trains, over widespread opposition from the community. Meanwhile anti-coal activists are still trying to fend off three proposed coal terminals in Oregon and Washington and Kinder Morgan is going ahead promoting its plan to enlarge and extend its Trans Mountain Pipeline that carries tar sands crude from Alberta to Burnaby, BC. If they have their way the Georgia Strait and Strait of San Juan de Fuca will become a shipping channel for scores of super tankers, carrying the heavy oil to refineries in California.

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The rallying cry: "Save the rainforests" means to most people tropical rainforests in the Amazon or Borneo. But there is another class of rainforests that is just as unique and important to protect: temperate and boreal rainforests. These rainforests, like their tropical counterparts, are rich in plants and wildlife, while they also contain some of the most massive trees on Earth. And some of these forests are virtually in our own backyards.

On this episode of Locus Focus host Barbara Bernstein talks with Dominick DellaSala, president and chief scientist at the Geos Institute in Ashland. He is the editor and principal writer of Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World a book recently published by Island Press, that brings together more than 30 forest scientists from around the world to describe the ecology, conservation and threats to these lesser known rainforests. We'll learn about the significance of rainforests in the interior of British Columbia, Japan, New Zealand, Norway and South America, as well as closer to home along the Pacific Coast of North America.

Dominick A. DellaSala is Chief Scientist and President of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and President of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology. He is a frequent guest on Locus Focus and was featured in Barbara's 2007 documentary Sculpted By Fire.

It's conventional wisdom that the new more heavily GOP configuration in Congress spells bad news for climate policy. There's some truth in that, but this week on Locus Focus we look at a more positive side to the story. In what has appeared to be an overall hostile political climate this fall, progressive approaches to climate policy still held their own in most elections across the Pacific Northwest and California. Our guest this week is Eric de Place with the Sightline Institute in Seattle and he'll share with us some reasons to be hopeful, while remaining watchful at the same time.

We'll talk about the defeat of Proposition 23 in California, which would have suspended the state's climate laws, the re-election of California Senator Barbara Boxer and the elections (or re-elections) of California Governor Jerry Brown and Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber. But we'll also look at the difficult course ahead for seriously dealing with climate change, made even more challenging by weakened Democratic control of the region's state legislatures.

Eric de Place, senior researcher, contributes research and writing for the Cascadia Scorecard, especially on sprawl, economic security, wildlife, and other topics. He also writes for the Daily Score blog and contributes to a number of other Sightline projects, including climate policy in the western states. In 2006, Eric’s work helped defeat ballot initiatives in several Western states that would have severely eroded community and environmental protections. Before coming to Sightline, he worked with the Northwest Area Foundation, helping communities develop strategies to alleviate poverty. He has a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. After the world gets fixed, Eric plans to spend much more time reading good books beside remote mountain lakes. Read Eric's latest blog posts here.

In January a new congress takes over, with a reduced Democratic majority in the Senate and a lopsided Republican majority in the House. For the first time there will be an official House Caucus of Climate Change Deniers. In this new political environment, what prospects remain for continuing to maintain — let alone enhance — protection for the natural environment? And how can the United States provide any credible leadership in international negotiations to cutback greenhouse gas emissions when so many members of congress don't even believe that climate change is a real problem?

On this episode of Locus Focus, we talk with New York Times science writer Andrew Revkin about the challenges facing the environment and its advocates during the next session of Congress. But we'll also look at how this November's election has motivated scientists, including hundreds of members of the American Geophysical Union to speak out and challenge disinformation and misinformation deployed in the policy wars over global warming.

About Andrew Revkin

He's an author and reporter focused on the global environment and the human condition, as well as a songwriter, guitarist, family guy and senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University.

About Dot Earth

By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. In Dot Earth, which recently moved from the news side of The Times to the Opinion section, Andrew C. Revkin examines efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits. Conceived in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Dot Earth tracks relevant developments from suburbia to Siberia. The blog is an interactive exploration of trends and ideas with readers and experts.

Richard Alpert was an eminent Harvard psychologist on the fast track to success when he fell in with fellow Harvard professor Timothy Leary who turned him on to LSD. Harvard University did not appreciate their ardent research on the psychological and spiritual potentials unleashed by LSD and other psychedelic drugs, and in 1963 Alpert and Leary were tossed out of academia. Leary continued to bask in his iconic status in the psychedelic counter-culture, but for Alpert, mind expansion via chemical substances became a catalyst for spiritual seeking. In 1967 he traveled to India, where he met his guru Neem Karoli Baba (affectionately known as Maharaj-ji), who gave him the name Ram Dass, which means "servant of God." Upon his return from India, Ram Dass became a pivotal cultural influence, forging a Western articulation of Eastern thought and spiritual practice that has resonated with millions of people in the West over the past forty years.

This week on Locus Focus we depart from our recent fare of environmental nightmares, to journey towards the spiritual core of what can inspire us to connect with and protect the earth, as well as our deepest selves. On the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Be Here Now, Ram Dass's monumental work about his own spiritual journey, we talk with Ram Dass's student and long-time friend Rameshwar Das, about the journey from Be Here Now to their current collaboration Be Love Now.

Upcoming events in Oregon with Rameshwar Das and Ram Dass:

Living Earth is hosting a

Bhakti Benefit Retreat & Celebration with Ram Dass and Friends

, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Ram Dass's classic book,

Be Here Now

. Thurs - Sun., December 2 - 5, at Breitenbush Hot Springs

Ram Dass will beam in for live tele-satsangs, joining Rameshwar Das, Shantala, Betsy Toll, and others who will be at Breitenbush. Ramesh is co-author of Ram Dass's new book, Be Love Now, and will present a short film that's part of the new e-book version of Be Here Now. He and others will share guru stories and Be Here Now reflections, plus daily kirtan, dharma talks, a raga performance, yoga, and meditation. All retreat proceeds will benefit Love Serve Remember Foundation, to support Ram Dass's work today.

Most Americans - and a growing number of people around the world - now eat meat that was grown on factory farms. The brutal, inhumane conditions in which factory farm animals are raised calls into question not just the ethics of eating meat but the very foundations of the democracy we like to believe we live in. CAFOs - Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations - crowd tens of thousands of animals together in their own filth, pumping them full of antibiotics and feed that their bodies are not designed to digest. Meanwhile small family farms, still practicing the traditions of sustainable animal husbandry, are being squeezed out of existence by a handful multi-national producers, leading us into this not-so-brave new world where farms are factories, animals are production units and multi-generational farmers are replaced by unskilled migrant laborers.

Daniel Imhoff is the editor of The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories and the photo-format companion volume, CAFO (Concentrated Animimal Feeding Operations):The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories. He is a writer and independent publisher whose many books include Food Fight, Farming with the Wild, Paper or Plastic, Building with Vision, and Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature. He lives in Northern California.

Last spring's BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico alerted us to the unforeseen hazards of deep water oil drilling. Since most of the remaining conventional sources of oil are located in politically unstable regions of the world, many political leaders are looking toward the reserves of oil locked in the abundant bitumen under the boreal forests of northern Alberta as our best source of oil. The Alberta government and the Canadian oil industry claim that these tar sands mining operations are being managed in an environmentally responsible manner. But a team of scientists from the University of Alberta at Edmonton and other colleges in Canada released a report that contradicts the government and industry claims. David Schindler, Peter Hodson and others analyzed 13 elements in river water and snow pack along the Athabasca River and its delta in a study that links tarsands development to deteriorating water quality in northeastern Alberta.

On this segment of Locus Focus we talk with scientist Peter Hodson about the findings of this study and how it calls into question claims that tar sands extraction is not harming the fragile environment of northern Alberta.

Dr. Peter Hodson is a professor at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario and director of its School of Environmental Studies. He is a past president of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), and twice served on its Board of Directors, as well as the Board of the SETAC World Council, Chair of the World Council Science Committee, and an editor of the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. Hodson has authored more than 180 technical publications related to fish toxicology and environmental contamination. He is currently studying the mechanisms of hydrocarbon toxicity to early life stages of fish, the environmental impacts of crude oil, among other topics.

The environment is on the ballot in hundreds of electoral contests in all 50 states, in the guise of anti-environmental, anti-science and anti-climate candidates and ballot measures. More than 750 congressional and state legislative candidates have signed on to support the anti-climate agenda of Americans for Prosperity—a corporate front group funded by the oil billionaire Koch brothers. In California the Koch brothers have spearheaded Proposition 23, a ballot measure to suspend the Global Warming Act of 2006. This law requires that greenhouse gas emissions in the state be cut to 1990 levels by 2020. If this measure passes California would forfeit the vanguard position it has forged for establishing regulations that vigorously confront climate change and slip back into the clutches of the oil and coal industry.

This week on Locus Focus host Barbara Bernstein talks with Steve Kretzmann, Executive Director of Oil Change International, about the money trail that has brought Proposition 23 before California voters and threatens to undermine the state's landmark climate change legislation. We'll learn what we can do to work for the separation of Oil and State.

Steve Kretzman founded Oil Change International in 2006 to educate about the true impacts of fossil fuels and to conduct research, education and organizing to hasten our transition to clean energy.

Now that most of the easy oil on our planet is gone, oil companies are turning to exotic places to extract oil: deep under the ocean as well as from shale and sand formations. In the far north of Alberta, Canada, millions of acres of pristine boreal forest are being stripped-mined for a substance called bitumen, that holds oil in solid form. Since 2001 this operation has accelerated at a rate that industry and government can't even keep up with, and it has turned a once pristine wilderness into hell on earth.

On this episode of Locus Focus, Sam Mace—Inland Northwest Project Director for Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition—and host Barbara Bernstein discuss why we in the lower forty-eight should care about tar sands extraction in Canada. These operations that are having such a dire impact on the enviroment in northern Alberta, also affect the Columbia-Snake River Basin. Huge mining equipment from Korea - two-thirds the length of a football field, three stories high and weighing at least 344,000 lbs. - has already made its way up the Columbia and Snake Rivers and now sits in the port of Lewiston, ID, waiting for permits to continue its trip along narrow mountain roads through Idaho and Montana on its way to the Alberta tar sands pits.

"The tar sands constitute one of our planet's greatest threats. They are a double-barreled threat. First, producing oil from tar sands emits two or three times the global warming pollution of conventional oil. But [it] also diminishes one of the best carbon reduction tools on the planet: Canada's Boreal Forest."
—James Hansen, NASA climate scientist

Originally from Coos Bay, Oregon, Sam Mace has worked on behalf of forests, fish and rivers for 15 years. She first moved to Eastern Washington in 1994 and joined efforts to restore the Snake River in 1998 as the Salmon and Steelhead Project Coordinator for Washington and Idaho Wildlife Federations based in Spokane. In 2000 Sam moved back to Oregon where she worked for Trout Unlimited. Homesick for snow, desert, the Palouse and the Snake River, Sam returned to Eastern Washington in 2004 as Save Our Wild Salmon's Inland Northwest Project Director. Sam spends her free time hiking, fishing and floating western rivers and looks forward to doing a trip on a free-flowing lower Snake River some day in the future.

Photos below show the landscape through which these behemoths would traverse on their way to Alberta: the Columbia River Gorge and the wild and scenic river corridors of the Clearwater and Lochsa Rivers in Idaho.

For more information and photos of the Alberta Tar Sands Mines check out these links:

Missoula Floods were one of the greatest sets of geological events in North America. Occurring as many as 40 times during the last ice age, the floods were caused by waters released from ancient Lake Missoula that scoured the Columbia River basin, carved out the Columbia River Gorge, and swept across at least 16,000 square miles of the Pacific Northwest. On this episode of Locus Focus, Portland State University geology professor Scott Burns returns to discuss the effect of the floods on the landscape of the Willamette Valley. He'll also share the incredible story of how geologist J. Harlen Bretz discovered evidence of the floods nearly 100 years ago. Bretz's claim that these prehistoric floods caused cataclysmic geological changes challenged mainstream geologic thought at the time, and it wasn't until the 1950s that his ideas became accepted as scientific fact.

Scott Burns, PhD. is a professor of geology at Portland State University with research interests that include engineering geology, environmental geology, soils, landslides, geomorphology, and quaternary geology. When not teaching, he serves on numerous geological committees and has written numerous articles, chapter contributions, and books, including Cataclysms on the Columbia, co-authored with John Eliot Allen and Marjorie Burns.

It's been nearly two years since a neighborhood-backed plan was approved to rebuild the Sellwood Bridge with only two auto lanes, along with bike and pedestrian paths and street car tracks. But in recent months the final decisions on bridge design and funding have hit stumbling blocks. While the bridge is operated by the County, it connects on the west side with state-owned Highway 43 and on the eastside with city-owned SE Tacoma Street. These different jurisdictions are now caught up in a turf battle, holding the future of the Sellwood Bridge between their horns. On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with Sellwood neighborhood activist Eric Miller about some of the sticking points between the city, county and state, and why the same issues of sustainability and livability that motivated the neighborhood to organize two years are still of major concern.

Eric Miller is a Sellwood resident and a current At-Large SMILE Board member. A public health physical therapist, Eric is currently a stay-at-home Dad and a community activist. He co-founded the Sellwood Playgroup Association to bring families with young children together and to build community. Through the Playgroup Association he organized a broad network of neighbors who helped prevent the Sellwood Bridge from being replaced by a huge, four-lane behemoth.

Comments

Barbara, I hope you might forward my comments to your guest. I was only able to listen to part of today's program but I am very interested. I want to raise my concerns about two prevailing frames that arise on your show and throughout serious discussion of climate change that I believe do great damage to the efforts to raise the awareness of the public and help them understand the urgency needed when addressing this issue.
First is the frame that global warming is happening slowly and will continue to do so. I do not believe the facts support such an assertion and not only does no one know that warming will not suddenly serge forward it seems to be doing exactly that. A report out last week raised the projected temperature for the planet by the end of the century to 9F from 4F degrees. That means that we are going to hit 4F by---2040? Until recently no one imagined the arctic ice cap could melt in anything like our lifetimes but in fact it will and it may do so as soon as 2013! The problem with the frames that give people the impression that GW is a slow process is that it provides fauls comfort, "Oh, technology will fix it before it happens," or "It is not my problem." Neither one is the case but too many people still think that way. So please start using a different frame from "by the end of the century," or “future generations." Instead say "within our life times," and stress the urgency. After all it is much more accurate to say catastrophic climate change is happening right now.

The second frame is that one cannot attribute any given weather event to global warming. That is only partly true. In fact one might say that you cannot not attribute any given weather event to climate change such is the post-industrial influence on the pre-industrial trajectory of the climate---we have departed the Holocene and are in the Antropocene some scientist tell us. It is like a basketball launched toward a basket that gets tipped by one of the players. Its trajectory is for ever changed. I think it is more accurate to say that the weather everywhere and everyday has been influence to some degree by GW. This is important because the frame that one cannot tell if an event is caused by climate change is asking them not to believe there own "eyes," experiences, or impressions which are often very astute. For instance in Oklahoma where I grew up we used to have thunderstorms in April and the 100F days did not come until late July. This year they had wild fires near Oklahoma City in April and the temperatures have been in the hundreds throughout much of this June---that has increasingly become the trend and is consistent with climate change projections. Now Oklahomans should by all rights believe that what they are experiencing is in fact global warming. It may be noted that Inhofe is a Senator from Oklahoma and one of the most radical global warming deniers and obstructionist in government.
I have been keeping up with this issue for a long time now and am alarmed at the rapidity that things are taking place. I truly believe we are probably in for crop failures, water shortages, and mass migrations here in North America, in this country, within our lifetimes and whereas I think there is a fine line to be drawn to not panic or send people into despair I think scientist tend to be much too measured in their statements. It is as though there is smoke billowing out of the projection room and the scientists don’t want be caught dead yelling fire in a crowded theater because there is no "proof" that there is in fact a fire.
Scientist have long dismissed the near term risk of a methane/co2 release from the arctic or the ocean meanwhile there is growing indications that that is exactly what is happening. As a NASA scientist you should know that a huge methane release was detected on Mars a few years ago and that is within a much more static system than ours----that should give us pause!
The public needs to be prepared in case there is a sudden spike in methane from the Arctic so I hope in the future Barbara you will direct your discussions of climate change toward the rapidity of changes already taking place and the potential danger of being too complacent and smug about what we know and what we think we do or do not know. Thank you.

I recently interviewed Phil Mote who has replaced climate change denier George Taylor as Oregon's State Climatologist. Like any careful scientist Mote does not feel comfortable attributing specific weather events to climate change. But he gave me a analogy that I like: It's like playing Russian Roulette and adding a second bullet to the chamber of the revolver. If you blow your head off it doesn't really matter whether it was the original bullet or added bullet that did you in.

While I support solar energy, I warn against pie-in-the-sky proposals that make it sound like we can find new sources to keep living our wasteful lives. The scale of the problem is lost when we pretend that putting solar panels on 100 roofs signifies real change.

There is some hope to be found in using solar power efficiently. This does NOT include powering electric resistance heaters with photovoltaics. It does mean passive solar heating, solar hot water, and solar clothes driers (AKA clotheslines).

When you have used conservation and innovation to convert the wasteful electric grid into a sustainable system, then we can begin the conversation about supplimenting the system for our transportation problems. Until then, the only real sustainable alternatives to petroleum are wind, human, and animal powered vehicles. Coal and nuclear, the primary sources of new electricity, are polluting uses of nonrenewable resources.

Walk, ride a bicycle, sail (without motor), and use horse and ox cart, if you are truly concerned about the serious threat of climate change. Park your car forever. We cannot afford cars any longer.

i think now is a good time to talk more about what socialism actually is - common ownership of the means of production - and what is is not - redistributing wealth. you are right to continue pointing out that what obama is talking about is a progressive tax structure, not socialism.

the progressive tax idea actually comes from adam smith himself, "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion." [from book 5, ch.2 on taxes]

The intro music to Locus Focus is a song by Hugh Masakela called "Change." It's on his album "Time," which came out a few years ago. I plan on playing the song each week until Robert Mugabe relinquishes power in Zimbabwe.

Did you see the piece in the NY Times re schizophrenia and autism having possible roots in parental dna - that is mother mix:father's mix? That is female characteristics manifesting as schizophrenia from mother dna and autistic characteristics from father's?